Negative Calorie Foods: Oh Really?

When you ask a fitness expert the best way to loose weight, the answer you most commonly hear is to consume less calories than you burn up. I like that answer because it seems to make sense.

Well, I liked it until recently when I broke my hip making it impossible for several months to 'burn' much of anything.

Of course we are burning calories all day long and even during the night while we sleep. But to be limited in mobility and try to burn more calories than we consume is a very hard task to perform.

I remember when I finally graduated from the wheelchair and walker to crutches, I ventured out for daily walks. I had a certain route that I knew equaled one mile, so this became my path to exercise for strengthening my hip. I felt comfortable with not being too far away from home and knew how far my home was when I was feeling too much pain.

Returning home after crutching it for 1 mile, I would go to my exercise calculator and see how many calories I had burned. The questions would include: what kind of activity I performed, how long I performed it and what level of exertion I felt.

Well, I never broke a sweat, so I had to put in low as my level of activity. Filling in my information the first time, the calculator would calculate- 90-100 calories. No way!! That was like burning one pat of butter. It hardly seemed worth it for all that effort and pain I was putting my body through.

Then I discovered Negative Calorie Foods. Well, I didn't actually discover them, but I heard this term for the first time and researched it further.

All food has calories. But not all calories are created equal. I knew this. If you ate 100 calories of broccoli, it would be significantly better for you than 100 calories of sugar if you were trying to loose weight.

So the idea of Negative Calorie Foods had my attention. Basically to explain what Negative Calorie Foods are- they are foods that burn more calories while digesting them than the foods themselves contain.